Building a new platform to showcase the most stunning properties on earth and connect Dow Jones editorial content with a growing real estate listing business.

Snapshot

After our first project with News Corp, we were welcomed as a technology partner for various business units including the Innovation Group. In this role, we provide a host of services including product strategy, UX design, development and an ever-ready ear on all things technology, application and software related.

Our work with Dow Jones continues on a few projects, most of which are still in progress. Mansion Global, however, has been publically launched and is now a growing platform that marries Dow Jones editorial content with high-end residential listings.

Business

Challenges

To enhance a robust real estate editorial, Dow Jones has been working to grow their real estate listings capabilities. With a strong presence in the mass-market real estate sector, Dow Jones sought a platform to leverage their reach with high net worth individuals to stake a claim at the top-end of the residential real estate listings market.

Results

Mansion Global Launched on May 1, 2015 and has become a revenue-generating platform that supports the ongoing marriage of Dow Jones’ real estate editorial with listings platforms.

With C-suite level scrutiny on the project, Mansion Global was an opportunity for the Innovation Team to educate the highest levels of the organization on how technology products are conceived, built and brought to market. Clearly, this had be done right to serve as an example for future projects.

Technology

Challenges

The Mansion Global platform presented multiple technology challenges. Of course, the public-facing site needed to offer a compelling user experience, rich in media, that would allow for users to apply multiple search criteria, perform currency conversions and otherwise reduce friction in the experience of international real estate acquisition.

For the brokers, we needed to develop a back-end platform that would make it easy for them to add media-rich listings and geolocation information to the site. We also needed to develop an analytics component that would let relators know who was engaging with their content and deliver insights on how to improve their chances of attracting buyers.

Results

The platform is now operational and stable as we continue to add capacity and new features in a continuous delivery model. Other key successes include the implementation of analytics tools that are critical to monitoring and evaluating the performance of listings. We also built robust content management systems for both brokers and the editorial team that uses a sophisticated tagging system and database management tools to allow for highly specific search criteria.

Automated testing and continuous integration are now in place using a custom framework. A syndication API has also been developed to allow platforms to communicate with Mansion Global content safely and seamlessly using Node.JS, Elastic search and API Gateway from AWS.

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“We had worked with Spark Digital in the past and were attracted to their can-do attitude and strong ability to collaborate and communicate with business leaders across our organization.”

Senior Vice President, Product - Platform & Product Delivery

“We needed a long term partner that could sustain and evolve the development effort over time. We also needed a firm that could build lasting relationships with the many stakeholders involved in this project. That’s what we found with Spark Digital.”

Senior Vice President, Product

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Our Approach

Our approach to Mansion Global started by carefully organizing our engagement with a 30-plus group of internal and external stakeholders including top Dow Jones management, sales staff, community managers and, of course, the realtors that power the platform with content.

Then, we worked with the client to clearly understand the MVP and product requirements they had defined as we prepared to translate those requirements into an operational stack. Working in a typical agile approach we marched towards our milestones and were able to launch the product in Spring 2015. Presently we continue to work with the product owner and a group of stakeholders to add new features in a continuous delivery model.

To support our ongoing role as a tech partner to the Dow Jones Innovation Group we’ve made flexibility a priority so we can apply resources where and when they’re needed. We also keep our recruitment engine moving forward at all times so we can add new talent quickly should Dow Jones need support. Finally, we developed a “shadow developer” program to make sure that are multiple people who can quickly begin productive work if client-side demand or urgency increases.

The Team

Our first engagement with Dow Jones was on a small project requiring only a few people for a short period. Through that experience, we learned that our teams work well together and began to build a working relationship built on trust. Soon, there was an expanded team working on Mansion Global including Developers, UXers, DevOps and QA engineers using a range of technologies including Node.JS, Hadoop, AWS, Ruby on Rails, PHP, WordPress, Swift, Angular, and React among others.

Working with the Client

Dow Jones depends on us to build the products that their business leaders envision. To achieve this we use an agile process that relies on clear lines of communication that have been thoughtfully developed between their product leaders and our team. By eliminating bureaucracy, we have been able to explore and experiment more while also staying to true to the delivery schedule and budget. Since launching the platform, our team remains a committed, trusted partner that has successfully implemented a continuous delivery model to implement valuable new features and functionality as needed.